Amazon link “Conversation is not merely a prelude to action, it is its very essence. … People don’t merely use language to communicate their desires about the future; they create the future in language together by making commitments to each other.” Reading The Unaccountability Machine reminded me of this book of essays by Fernando Flores, […]
Category: conversation
Spreading Ideas and Framing
Noah Brier wrote an interesting post yesterday about how certain ideas spread virally even when people disagree with them. His examples include Sarah Palin or Wired’s “Blogging is dead” article, where the blogosphere is buzzing about how bad an idea something is, but are still spreading the original idea far beyond its original audience because […]
Organizational Cognition
Over the past seven weeks (good golly, where does the time go?) at Google, I’ve noticed a funny habit of mine. Whenever I overhear a conversation involving something that is related to my team’s work, I drop whatever I’m working on and wander over to listen in. Now, one might guess this is due to […]
Age of Conversation 2 is now out
A few months ago, I volunteered to contribute an essay to a compendium called “The Age of Conversation 2”. The first “Age of Conversation” book resulted after two editors collected submissions on the topic of conversation from one hundred bloggers and self-published the result at lulu.com. The second book, in which my essay appears, is […]
Meeting Dynamics
As I am learning the lay of the land at Google, I’ve been initiating one-on-one meetings with people around me so that I can learn what they do and gain some different perspectives on what my group produces. I wrote up my notes after my meeting with one coworker, and after he reviewed what I […]
Adversarial vs. collaborative communication styles
Continuing on my recent theme of zero-sum vs. non-zero-sum thinking in management, today I want to discuss two different communication styles, which I am calling adversarial and collaborative. The adversarial style is essentially the Thunderdome approach to communication: “Two ideas enter, one idea leaves.” The default assumption of the adversarialist is that the other person’s […]
Age of Conversation
A few months ago, I read a post calling for authors for a book called The Age of Conversation. It sounded interesting, so I put in my name and will be one of 275 people (listed below) contributing a single page 400-word essay on the theme of “Why Don’t People Get It?” Here’s where I […]
Balanced socializing
I just got back from two weeks of vacation with an inordinate amount of socializing. In addition to the normal catching up I do with friends in the Bay Area, I also attended a wedding which brought many friends from out of town. It was delightful to hear what everybody is doing, and to pick […]
Transmedia conversations
I had a minor epiphany last week after my friend Jocelyn posted a quote from our conversation at dinner on my Facebook wall. For those of you not on Facebook, the wall is a single-threaded discussion board, where people can write comments to you that are visible to others. One of the reasons I didn’t […]
Blog comments and community
I’m a couple weeks late in commenting on the post where Joel explains why he doesn’t let people comment on his posts: When a blog allows comments right below the writer’s post, what you get is a bunch of interesting ideas, carefully constructed, followed by a long spew of noise, filth, and anonymous rubbish that […]
